In the past, pain was considered outside the realm of medicine because of its subjective nature, and often ignored and left untreated. This outlook has changed in recent times, and now the assessment and treatment of pain has become an integral part of medical practice. In the US this fact is evidenced by guidelines put forth in 1999 by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health care Organizations (JCAHO), calling pain the “fifth vital sign,” and in federal legislation making 2001-2011 the “Decade of Pain Control and Research.”
While research has shown that patient self-report instruments are an economical and reliable means of assessing a person's pain condition, the means for doing this has generally been limited to handwritten diaries. With or without handwritten diaries, diagnosing and treating patients with pain disorders involves sorting through and evaluating large amounts of information. Typically a health care professional asks a patient a series of questions to help diagnose the problem and may record certain information on a diagram of the human body. When a patient experiences different degrees of pain over a given period of time it can be time consuming for the health care professional to record all of the information. In addition to consuming a large amount of time, it can be difficult for the health care professional to effectively analyze all of the information collected.
As the amount of information provided to a health care professional increases, so does the probability that the health care professional will overlook relevant symptoms or fail to recognize a correlation between a symptom and other information provided to the health care professional. As a result, the health care professional may order the patient to undergo tests that would not otherwise be necessary. Unnecessary tests can be expensive and prolong the time period in which a patient suffers from pain.
For the patient, it is difficult to recall the exact nature and location of pain, particularly if its occurrence happens over a long period of time. Specific periods or moments may be recalled, but details of its occurrence (e.g. time, date, place), and variables (e.g. symptoms, lifestyle changes, medications) associated with it, before, during and after the occurrence of pain may go unreported. Accordingly, there exists a need in the art for a system that allows physicians and health care professionals to efficiently obtain pain information from patients (along with medical records) and that helps analyze and accurately display the obtained information in a manner that is meaningful to the user and/or the user's physician or health care professional. There also exists a need in the art for a system that allows individuals to efficiently provide such pain information and corresponding medical information.